Originally this piece was written
in March and April of 2000. It was based on dialogues from late 1999 and
was used as a "vacation" of sorts from the tedious work of revising the
templates of a treatise which was slated to be (and was) my web essay writing
debut. Because of the nature of this project at the time - as well as other
"vacation" projects which were written concurrent to it, it was never properly
finished. Gradually as my essay writing style developed, there was a seeming
disconnect between appearance of my later writings and the earliest writings
from pre-July of 2000. (The treatise and treatise-related pieces excepted.)

One of the problems of doing too
many pieces at once is that each in its own way suffers a bit. This essay
went together rather easily and based on the feedback over the years, it
suffered little from its state of incompletion. Therefore, in this revision,
I am using 90% of the same material as before. Most of the revisions are
minor adjustments to previously written material to finetune it a little.
The only really significant differences you will see is that (i) all source
references were blockquoted this time (ii) the Patristic citations originally
comprising the bulk of Part III of the essay have been moved to an Appendix
at the end of the piece. This enabled for a bibliography to be put together
with a notes section as this has become my norm when writing an essay.
Part III was thus turned into a sort of anticipatory summary if you will
of the later Patristic evidences that comprise the Appendix.

Also, the font size was originally
larger and the work was hyperlinked throughout section by section. As the
third anniversary of this essay's release is about six weeks away, it seemed
fitting to revisit the work and complete it. This I have done by adding
the bibliography and notes section to this work so that it reads as my
online essays written subsequent to this one do. I have also put this on
multiple urls with a central outline page at the original link to make
it easier to read. Hopefully these adjustments will make for an even better
product than the previous version of this work.